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tl;dr It's highly unlikelyIn 1975 Steve Sasson invented the digital camera. Steve Sasson worked for a photography company in Rochester. Sasson's new camera was, for the first time, was filmless. Management laughed at him and brushed off his innovation. A camera that wouldn't need film? That would be like a razor that didn't need blades or a printer that never needed ink. For a company that generated a large portion of it's revenue from film, this was blasphemy. According to a Harvard Business School case study that following year in 1976 the company controlled 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the United States. They weren't just making photos, they were making money.For his employer, Steve's new invention was a departure from a legacy business model that had been around for nearly 100 years. Pursuing this new digital photography thing would have required restructuring, relinquishing, and a reinventing. It would have required abandoning almost a century of tradition. Management instead chose to ignore it and for two more decades the company thrived. And then it didn't.By the early 2000's the company realized that it had made a mistake ignoring Steve and shifted their growth focus to digital photography. It was just too late. In January of 2012 the company filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection. That same month the company delisted it's stock from the NYSE. The ticker symbol was KODK. A company that had started with one man's invention, a company that grew into a titan, a company that changed the world forever had fallen.I mention the tale of the Eastman Kodak in reference to Weight Watchers because their stories are not that different. Weight Watchers too was sparked by one person. Weight Watchers too grew into a global phenomenon. Weight Watchers too changed the world.Jean Nidetch was a humble housewife with a penchant for food especially her Mallomars which she hid around the house. Jean Nidetch was not that different from other women. Like her friends she struggled to balance her love of food and her weight. By 1961 her 5'7" frame was supporting 214lbs. Her waist had swollen to 44"--a friend had mistaken her for being pregnant.Nidetch set out to do something about it. Informally a group of her friends gathered in the basement of her Queens home. They recognized that the struggles they each faced alone in regards to food were not just theirs. With adherence to a diet plan that Nidetch had adapted and the support of her group, the once portly pioneer had slimmed down to a svelte 142lbs. As her waist line shrank, the group of women who gathered together with her grew.Nidetch and her friends had stumbled upon the formula for a weight loss social support movement that would go on to become Weight Watchers. In it's early years the Weight Watchers movement, which although it was a business still felt like a non-profit to many of its member, spread across the country and into the homes of predominantly women around the world. Through a series of meetings and plans, Weight Watchers schooled and supported a movement of women who were determined to lose the weight and keep it off. It's most successful members, those that remained within 2 pounds of their goal weight, were recognized as Lifetime Members.The early Weight Watchers culture was very much old school. By the early 00's the Long Island based company, which had been owned by the H.J. Heinz Company since 1978, employed over 40,000 people at it's headquarters and meetings locations around the world. The brand had grown from housewife help group to household name.In 1999 Heinz decided to spin off Weight Watchers and it was purchased by the Artal Group of Invus Financial Advisers for $775m in a leveraged buyout. Across the country something called the dot com era was beginning. Although the world's leading weight loss system was still very much offline, Invus saw the potential of taking Weight Watchers online.On the day the acquisition closed a new company, WeightWatchers.com, was formed at the Invus office in NYC. This new entity, which had licensed the Weight Watchers brand and system for a 10% royalty, enticed early employees with equity among them Thilo Semmelbauer (who would go on to be the President & COO of Shutterstock), David Kirchhoff (who later served as Weight Watchers CEO until his departure in 2013), and Sabrina Raymond-Leblanc (who went on to lead Weight Watchers Innovations team until her departure in 2014).In 2001 under the guidance of Invus Weight Watchers($WTW) went public with a $24 initial share price. With it's now $40oM+ war chest, WWI acquired it's sister business WW.com for $550M, which by 2006 had grown revenue from $0 to $130M with only $100k seed from Invus and a $35M loan from WWI that had been repaid prior to the acquisition.The management team of WW.com ousted the old guard from WWI, moved the headquarters from Long Island to NYC's Madison Ave, and attempted to fuse the very different business meetings + retail product sales and dot com membership fee business models. They never really integrated fully and within the company WWI and WW.com continued to operate more like sister companies than a single entity. This new super weight loss company now had a market cap approaching $5B.This new Weight Watchers super company, once just a social network of housewives, had grown into an empire with branded products, locations around the world, a publishing unit, WW.com, and reams of scientific research. Was Weight Watchers now too big to fail?In 2012 after a series of successful quarters, $WTW peaked over $80/share and it was at this point that the Artal controlled board instituted a share buyback through a Dutch auction. Although Artal agreed to not participate in the buyback, WWI agreed to a clause that would require WWI to buyback an equivalent number of shares to retain Artal's 52% control. WWI purchased over 18M shares at $82 and took on $1.5B in debt doing so.Outside of the board room, the weight loss world had already been changing. Although it initially led the dot com weight loss arms race, scattered focus and status quo preservation strategies (whether intentional or not ) had stagnated the business' growth. After 50 years of running at the front of the Weight Loss Industry pack, Weight Watchers knees were starting to wear out.At this point Artal had more than recouped the initial $775M investment in WWI with some sources going as far to say that during their ownership history they have generated $3.8B through selling shares, the acquisition of WW.com by WWI, and dividends while still maintaining control of both the company and its board. This is the beginning of the end for $WTW.The now buried in debt WWI then experienced a number of quarters of rapid decline that they attributed to increased competition from free apps and activity trackers. With Kirchhoff's departure in 2013, the company reins were turned over to James Chambers an experienced CPG executive who had for many years encouraged Americans to eat more Candy and Confection through his roles at Kraft, Nabisco, Cadbury. Chambers began his career at Nabisco, the maker of WW Founder Jean Nidetch's morseled and much maligned Mallomars. Was this the beginning of a new renaissance for the iconic Weight Loss brand?Kirchhoff, a towering but amicable 6+ feet tall, prior to his departure had become a public champion for the company and the cause. Like the company's matriarch, Kirchhoff too had begun his WW journey both as an executive and as a member. After working at BCG and PepsiCO Kirchhoff had ballooned from a once lanky kid teenager to a 245lb power tie wearing executive. He went on to document, again much like Nidetch, his weight loss journey in his 2013 book Weight Loss Boss: How to finally win at losing-- and take charge in an out-of-control food world. Kirrchhoff, very much in the spirit of Weight Watchers group sharing culture, regularly used social media and his Man Meets Scale blog to participate in the global weight watchers communityChambers by contrast is a much more private executive. Outside of quarterly update calls, he hasn't had much of a public presence in the World of Weight Watchers. It is a bit perplexing why WWI Chairman Ray Debbane and the board chose a Candy Executive to lead WW much needed turnaround. Since the beginning of his tenure as CEO in 2013, $WTW has shed nearly 80% of it's share price. As I write this the stock is trading just above $7.00--up, but not by much, from it's 52 week low of $6.71.WWI is in serious trouble as evident by it's 2015 Q1 quarterly update. In North American alone, the company's largest market, membership declined by 25%. It's most recent Winter 2014 innovation added a cost intensive 24x7 coaching up sell that so far less than 5% of subscribers have taken advantage of.WWI has only recently started making strategic technology acquisitions with three in the last year Wellos, the similarly named Wello, and hot5. It's hard to understand why WW is looking to move towards the Online Fitness Video space where it will be go head-to-head with IAC owned DailyBurn and P90x's parent company BeachBody LLC. In the spirit of embracing the new wave of Digital Health startups, WW has shifted focus from it's cobranded Philips ActiveLink tracker towards an open-api model which has already been integrated with the two leading tracker companies Fitbit and Jawbone.Once an industry leading pioneer, Weight Watchers seems to have lost it's way with a product that is no longer priced competitively, limited working capital to devote towards it's brand revival, an aging core user base, and an eroding talent pool from a combination of cost cutting measures and management jumping ship for less rocky seas. Has Weight Watchers reduced fat cheese already been moved?Like Kodak before it, Weight Watchers was once an innovation company and a globally leader in its respective category. Fifteen years ago the founding of WeightWatchers.com planted the seed for what became the Second Chapter of WWI growth. Unfortunately with no such scion in the horizon it's seem that Weight Watchers next chapter might just be 11.